The story of computing and communications over the past eighty years has been a story of quite astounding improvements in the capability, cost and efficiency of computers and communications. If the same efficiency improvements had been made in the automobile industry cars would cost a couple of dollars, would cost fractions of a cent to use for trips, and be capable of travelling at speeds probably approaching the speed of light! more
The Internet Society has announced the 2024 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award recipients, honoring Steve Crocker and Xing Li for their pioneering work in advancing the global Internet infrastructure. more
On May 19, 2024, the Internet's 50th anniversary was celebrated in a virtual event named i50, drawing participation from 1,000 IEEE members and internet enthusiasts from 56 countries. The live-streamed event was a highlight in a series of celebrations marking this milestone. more
Digital communications systems always represent a collection of design trade-offs. Maximizing one characteristic of a system may impair others, and various communications services may choose to optimize different performance parameters based on the intersection of these design decisions with the physical characteristics of the communications medium. more
There have been a number of occasions when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has made a principled decision upholding users' expectations of privacy in their use of IETF-standardised technologies. (Either that, or they were applying their own somewhat liberal collective bias and to the technologies they were working on!) The first major such incident that I can recall is the IETF's response to the US CALEA measures. more
The world of the Internet mourns the loss of a pioneering force, as Dave Mills, a luminary in the realm of computer networking, passed away on January 17, 2024, at the age of 86 (announced by Vint Cerf). A trailblazer and visionary, Mills played a pivotal role in shaping the very foundations of the interconnected world we inhabit today. more
ome 50 years ago, at the Palo Alto Research Centre of that renowned photocopier company Xerox, a revolutionary approach to local digital networks was born. On the 22nd of May 1973, Bob Metcalf authored a memo that described "X-Wire," a 3Mbps common bus office network system developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). more
The idea for Ethernet was born fifty years ago in May 1973 when Robert Metcalf coined the word Ethernet. He had been studying ALOHAnet, developed at the University of Hawaii in 1971 and was the first public demonstration of a wireless packet data network. Metcalf used the work Ethernet as a reference to luminiferous aether, a concept postulated in the 17th century to explain how light could be transmitted through a vacuum. more
At Verisign, we believe that continuous improvements to the safety and security of the global routing system are critical for the reliability of the internet. As such, we've recently embarked on a path to implement Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) within our technology ecosystem as a step toward building a more secure routing system. In this blog, we share our ongoing journey toward RPKI adoption and the lessons we've learned as an operator of critical internet infrastructure. more
In a recent workshop, I attended, reflecting on the evolution of the Internet over the past 40 years, one of the takeaways for me is how we've managed to surprise ourselves in both the unanticipated successes we've encountered and in the instances of failure when technology has stubbornly resisted to be deployed despite our confident expectations to the contrary! What have we learned from these lessons about our inability to predict technology outcomes? more
The IETF met in November 2022 in London. Among the many sessions that were held in that meeting was a session of the Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group, (DINRG). The research group's ambitions are lofty: DINRG will investigate open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity management, name resolution, resource/asset ownership management, and resource discovery. more
When I was first advocating home networking at Microsoft, we encountered a problem. The existing systems and applications had implicitly assumed they were inside a safe environment and didn't consider threats from bad actors. Early Windows systems hadn't yet provided file system with access control and other protections though there were some attempts to have separate logins to keep some settings separate. more
Vinton Cerf, widely known as the "Father of the Internet," has been awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2023 for his contributions to the development of the Internet architecture and for his leadership in its growth as a critical infrastructure for society. more
In 1987, CompuServe introduced GIF images, Steve Wozniak left Apple and IBM introduced the PS/2 personal computer with improved graphics and a 3.5-inch diskette drive. Behind the scenes, one more critical piece of internet infrastructure was quietly taking form to help establish the internet we know today. November of 1987 saw the establishment of the Domain Name System protocol suite as internet standards. more
CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) is a routing system in which network engineers can distribute IP addresses based on the size of their specific network. This is more efficient than the previous system, which assigned IP addresses depending on whether the size of a network fits into one of only three sizes: Class A, Class B, and Class C. more